4 ms·

I kinda agree with Sen. Grassley, although he doesn't seem to be articulating the issue very well. Remember what happened in 2020: near the presidential electi

I kinda agree with Sen. Grassley, although he doesn't seem to be articulating the issue very well. Remember what happened in 2020: near the presidential election, you couldn't even DM the URL of the NY Post story to others. [1] That's blatant censorship, no matter the merits of the news story. Given tech's extreme political bias [2], it is quite likely that something similar will happen again. Comparison to spam filtering seems to be the new pro-censorship talking point [3], so it's quite possible the thing itself will soon have some kind of political censorship built into it. There is some evidence (also mentioned in the article) that Google is already doing this. [4] If we want to live in a free society, we need to fight back against this. You really can't use email without some sort of spam filtering, but if the definition of spam is going to be muddied to serve political agendas, then you should have the option to choose your spam filter. [1]: https://thehill.com/policy/technology/521277-facebook-twitter-new-york-post-election-night-concerns https://thehill.com/policy/technology/521277-facebook-twitte... [2]: https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2020/11/02/tech-billionaire-2020-election-donations-final-tally.html https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2020/11/02/tech-billionaire-2020-el... [3]: E.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31059882 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31059882 [4]: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2203.16743.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/2203.16743.pdf

thephyber 4y ago
I’m not convinced GMail spam rules are purposely set up to do this. It’s easy enough for the users to not want this content. And I personally was somehow single-opted into government+politics from 7 states away and can’t manage to unsubscribe (despite using the tools that both Gmail and the sending vendor have). As a user it is incredibly frustrating and I will lash out in any way I can. Also worth pointing out that Republicans aren’t crying that Yahoo! Mail spam filtering seems to bias towards R and away from D. They don’t care about “fair” or “even playing field”. They want whatever benefits them and conveniently ignore the issues that bias to their benefit. Additionally, Google has already proposed a fix, which is to exempt political campaigns from email filtering (good luck on actual spammers not exploiting this) and to have the FEC (a small, under resourced government oversight department whose board is always political) somehow weigh in whenever there is a controversy. Better to build a system communication channel outside of email/SMS for this purpose.

thephyber 4y ago

I’m not convinced GMail spam rules are purposely set up to do this. It’s easy enough for the users to not want this content. And I personally was somehow single-opted into government+politics from 7 states away and can’t manage to unsubscribe (despite using the tools that both Gmail and the sending vendor have). As a user it is incredibly frustrating and I will lash out in any way I can. Also worth pointing out that Republicans aren’t crying that Yahoo! Mail spam filtering seems to bias towards R and away from D. They don’t care about “fair” or “even playing field”. They want whatever benefits them and conveniently ignore the issues that bias to their benefit. Additionally, Google has already proposed a fix, which is to exempt political campaigns from email filtering (good luck on actual spammers not exploiting this) and to have the FEC (a small, under resourced government oversight department whose board is always political) somehow weigh in whenever there is a controversy. Better to build a system communication channel outside of email/SMS for this purpose.